Alfred Hitchcock (109 page)

Cary Grant didn’t require Hitchcock to pick out his wardrobe. Cary Grant
gave
grooming tips, and Hitchcock usually told him just to “dress like Cary Grant.” And like Jimmy Stewart, Grant didn’t need acting advice, either; he picked his roles to fit him like his custom-made Saville Row suits.

During the location work in New York, Grant hid out in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, the very place where Thornhill is spotted by the thugs who mistake him for a spy. One day, the actor was summoned from his suite for the quick shot where Thornhill strolls across the hotel lobby. After he came down and did his bit, a visiting journalist, interviewing Hitchcock, wondered aloud how Grant could play the scene without conferring with the director. “Oh,” Hitchcock quipped, “he’s been walking across the lobby by himself for years!”

Grant had been effortlessly walking across the screen for almost thirty years. The friction on his last film with Hitchcock had been negligible, and by now was forgotten. But the star had always maintained an edgier relationship with Hitchcock than James Stewart had. “There was something between them that wasn’t always quite right,” recalled production designer Robert Boyle. “Hitch and I had a rapport and understanding deeper than words,” Grant liked to boast. Asked by a reporter how he communicated with Hitchcock, Grant replied, only half kidding, “All I have to do is disregard everything he says. But I guess what’s in his mind, and then I do just the opposite. Works every time, and I find it very pleasant.”

Grant didn’t need acting tips, but other coddling was called for. Although his image was one of utter poise and self-assuredness, the reality, according to costar James Mason, was an actor “conscientious, clutching his script until the last moment.” And, more than usual, Grant clutched the script of
North by Northwest.
The dapper actor complained incessantly that he really couldn’t make head or tails of the film’s implausible plotline. He told writer Ernest Lehman that he was afraid Hitchcock didn’t have a suitably light touch for the comedy—saying this, incidentally,
within earshot of Hitchcock himself, while they were on location in New York. (The director, noted John Russell Taylor in his book, was “furiously offended.”)

Grant was still complaining in mid-September, as they returned from their whirlwind travels and location work for interiors at the MGM studio. The bulk of scenes remained to be filmed—among them the Oak Room, the Long Island mansion, the police station, the UN, the Chicago hotel room, the auction, and Grant’s scenes with Saint aboard the train. Hitchcock had mapped out a comic rendition of
Vertigo’s
famous revolving kiss, with Thornhill and Eve kissing in medium close-up, twisting and squeezing up against the walls of a train compartment. This time the love-making was claustrophobic, however, and it was the camera that remained fixed as the stars spinned and groped. (The extra joke is that they’re responding not only to each other, but to the train rounding a bend.)

The Mount Rushmore crescendo also had to be filmed, as well as the intricate crop-duster sequence, which had been scheduled for near Bakersfield, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley. Over the years Hitchcock had often driven by the flatlands there en route to Santa Cruz, playing variations of the scene in his mind. Now, on location to film the scene, Hitchcock found himself barely speaking to either the star or writer of
North by Northwest.
Grant was still kvetching; meanwhile Lehman had developed misgivings about the next Hitchcock film, called
No Bail for the Judge
—misgivings strong enough that he had refused to work on the project.

It was “110 in the shade,” according to Lehman, on the day Hitchcock staged the sequence where Thornhill, keeping a rendezvous at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, is attacked by a crop duster diving down at him from the sky, forcing him to take temporary refuge in a field of corn.
^*
Hitchcock stripped down to shirtsleeves to oversee the laborious maneuvers of the stunt airplane. Between takes, there was plenty of time for Grant to sit and brood inside his air-conditioned limousine. The star beckoned Lehman inside to gripe about the (nonexistent) logic of the scene they were filming.

Hitchcock no longer even pretended logic. “I don’t even know who was in that airplane attacking Cary Grant,” he said later. “I don’t care. So long as that audience goes through that emotion.”

“Grant and Lehman found themselves quarreling with one another,” according to John Russell Taylor, “with Grant claiming it was really a David Niven script and it was lousy anyway because he didn’t understand
what was going on and he doubted if anyone else would. They were both aware, of course, that they were taking out their worries on each other because they could not manage to quarrel directly with Hitch.”

The director set these distractions aside while he stoically collected his shots in blistering heat: The stationary high-angle of the bus arriving to deposit Thornhill at an isolated stop; the ground-level view of Thornhill looking around in vain for his mysterious contact; an automobile arriving to disgorge a stranger (Malcolm Atterbury); the hilarious two-shot of the stranger and Thornhill staring suspiciously at each other from opposite sides of the highway; the stranger remarking, before he climbs on a bus headed in the opposite direction, on the peculiarity of a crop duster glimpsed in the distance, buzzing low over land where there are no crops; the crop duster wheeling and circling around, heading slowly toward Thornhill, and then diving at him and ultimately chasing him off the highway, into the rows of corn; the crop duster banking low and coming in for another attack, spraying chemical fertilizer that spreads through the rows of cornstalks, driving Thornhill back out of hiding … and then onto the highway.

The result was the justly celebrated sequence that includes the shot—one of the most recognizable in all of film—of Cary Grant racing frantically down the highway in all his sharp-suited splendor (toward the camera), with the murderous plane swooping down on him from behind.

The sequence ends with Thornhill standing in the middle of the road, defying an oil tanker that is roaring toward him, flattening himself beneath the truck just as it brakes; then sliding out from under, just as the crop duster misjudges and crashes into the tanker, exploding in a fireball. This—along with the shower scene in
Psycho
, the most famous of all Hitchcock crescendos—the director achieved under enormous duress and arduous weather, orchestrating elaborate stunts and effects, and finessing a star and writer who were snapping at each other just to keep from picking a fight with him.

Grant’s persona is central to the scene, but the net effect is all Hitchcock’s doing: a master blend of location plates and mattes, real scenery and fake, actors and doubles. On location the plane dove for Hitchcock, and the star of
North by Northwest
jogged for the director—but never in the same shot. And when Grant flopped to the ground, he flopped inside the studio—his full extension in the shot part of its beauty—in front of a prephotographed back projection.

All of it was then spliced together into a textbook montage that will be studied and enjoyed as long as cinema exists. The crop-duster sequence is a perfect Hitchcock short story—with almost no dialogue, only natural noise, and none of Bernard Herrmann’s music. One of Hitchcock’s grandest illusions, it couldn’t have been realized without the farsighted preparation
and hard, hard work that characterized the whole saga of
North by Northwest.

Approaching sixty, Hitchcock had already experienced intimations of mortality. In the past he had shrugged off disappointing films, but making them was now more than ever a struggle, and now each one felt important. In November, principal photography wrapped and the editing began. Bernard Herrmann started on his wittiest, most underrated score. Sam Taylor arrived, replacing Ernest Lehman on
No Bail for the Judge
, slated as a Paramount film to be directed by Hitchcock. (
To Catch a Thief
was the only other such arrangement to date.)

Meanwhile the budget of
North by Northwest
had risen steadily, from its original estimate of $3 million to somewhere in the lofty neighborhood of $4.3 million. By contract Cary Grant had to be paid $5,000 extra per day beyond the contracted period, as retakes and second-unit work continued. Studio chief Sol Siegel kept up a barrage of memos urging the director to stop spending money, but Hitchcock ignored them. As late as April, he was still shooting additional retakes and ordering more second-unit work.

Budgetary pressures may have opened the door for Saul Bass to create another one of his signature title sequences. All along Hitchcock had envisioned a different prologue: a series of office vignettes, establishing Thornhill in his ad-agency milieu. Although Grant uncharacteristically offered to act in such a title sequence for
free
, it was finally faster and cheaper to job out the animation of the titles to Bass, who surpassed himself with his arrows “forming a tilted graph,” which “become a skyscraper with traffic reflected in its all-glass surface,” in the words of Bill Krohn.

Hitchcock had joined another cat-and-mouse battle with the censors, managing once again to stay ahead of the cat. He fought a “running battle” with Production Code officials throughout January and February, according to Krohn, meeting repeatedly with the censors, patiently noting their qualms and reassuring them. The censors were particularly alarmed by Leonard’s effeminacy and the mention of Thornhill’s several divorces, and of course by the train-compartment overnights, which implied sexual relations between Thornhill and Eve.

One line that bothered Code officials at every stage of the script occurred during their dining-room encounter, when Eve suggestively informs Thornhill, “I never make love on an empty stomach.” Yet that’s how the director shot it. Ultimately Hitchcock agreed to overdub the line, though his solution let him have it both ways. Eve now said, “I never discuss love on an empty stomach,” but lip-readers everywhere could decipher Hitchcock’s version.

He traded away the dubbed line for the later implication that Thornhill and Eve had spent the night together. He even accepted dialogue offered by the head of the Production Code for the film’s coda. Geoffrey Shurlock suggested that Grant might say something like, “Come along, Mrs. Thornhill,” before he pulls Eve up into his compartment bed, indicating that the two have been married after the Mount Rushmore mayhem. That line was added in February, long after the scene was filmed, “looped over a closeup of Eve from the cafeteria scene,” according to Krohn, “with the background removed.”

Shurlock was so pleased that he overlooked the final shot: the train, bearing Thornhill and Eve in their upper berth, plunging into a darkened tunnel in markedly suggestive fashion. The shot wasn’t in Lehman’s script, nor in any draft the studio or censorship officials ever saw. Hitchcock added this very satisfying image at the last possible moment, in mid-March. The tunnel had been scouted by subordinates; the shot was sketched by Hitchcock, and the train was photographed from the rear by a pickup crew. It was “the most explicit depiction of the bottom-line facts of the sexual act ever pulled off under the Production Code,” in the words of Krohn—and it gave Hitchcock the last laugh.

And he tricked everybody into his title. Nobody had liked the working title, “In a Northwesterly Direction.” Along the way the director had tweaked it to
North by Northwest
, and then made sure that in one scene Thornhill tarried at a Northwest Airlines counter, offering a quick visual cue. Studio research reported that “north by northwest” was not an actual compass point, and the Title Committee was divided on its merits. Hitchcock shrugged, and said it was up to the committee—leading them to insist upon it.

“Do you know your
Hamlet?
” Sir John (Herbert Marshall) asks Markham (Edward Chapman) in
Murder!
“Every word of it,” Markham replies. Even Ernest Lehman was fooled into thinking that the Shakespearean reference was accidental:

Like all Hitchcock writers, Lehman operated purely on a need-to-know basis, and he didn’t need to know that the director had studied and memorized
Hamlet
(“every word of it”) back in his Jesuit school days. He didn’t realize that Hitchcock had turned to Shakespeare before in search of titles (
Rich and Strange
). Nor was he up on the many references to Shakespeare plays in other Hitchcock films (even Peter Lorre quotes the
Bard in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
). Though few besides the director and his star would have known it, Hitchcock had once even tried to turn Cary Grant into Hamlet. He never got closer than when making
North by Northwest.

When Hitchcock approved an unusually lengthy final cut of
North by Northwest
, MGM balked. Long films meant fewer showings per day, and less projected revenue. Sol Siegel ordered a screening of the Hitchcock film for the entire board of directors, on April 29, 1959.

Afterward, although the board was generally impressed, Siegel insisted that Hitchcock cut out the quiet interlude in the forest clearing between Eve and Thornhill after Thornhill’s staged “death” in the Mount Rushmore visitors’ center. The scene gives Eve the long-awaited opportunity to “explain” herself—but cutting it out would save several precious minutes of running time.

The director could have compromised;
North by Northwest
might have survived the loss. Instead, just as he battled Darryl Zanuck when
Lifeboat
was threatened, he fought back more fiercely than the MGM lion. On May 7 Hitchcock had a long lunch with his San Francisco lawyer, asking him to review his contract—the best he’d ever had in terms of leverage and autonomy, and the first to grant him final cut. Later that day he met with Siegel to deliver his reply: No, thank you. His tact and positive relationship with Siegel smoothed over any awkwardness, and MGM wisely backed off. Plans for last-minute postproduction touches, an amusing trailer (with Hitchcock promising “a vacation from all your problems … as it was for me!”), and an all-out publicity campaign went ahead unimpeded.